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I guess veterans are the right wing's new favorite sacred cow. Having discovered, via the phony DHS domestic-terrorism controversy, that they can gleefully club liberals over the head with anything even remotely resembling a slight to the sacred honor of American veterans -- such slights, evidently, including insufficiently abject prostration -- Republicans are now wielding said club at every available opportunity.

Let's face it: the Right really hates that the folks in the military in fact love President Obama. And so propagating the notion that Democrats are "anti-military" is a big deal right now.

Last week, for instance, as the new federal hate-crimes bill was passing out of the House Judiciary Committee, Republican Rep. Tom Rooney of Florida tried to include veterans in the list of protections.

This was a classic right-wing twofer: Work to undermine the hate-crimes bill, and smear Democrats at the same time! Pretty, clever, eh?

Sure enough, after Glenn Beck coughed this one up Friday night, there was Sean Hannity last night, regurgitating Beck's stale hairball:

Hannity: Now, Congresswoman, including our soldiers in this bill would not belittle anybody. And I think you and Janet Napolitano need to revisit your opinion of our veterans.

Actually, Feeney's proposal would render the legislation moot and unconstitutional, because it would then be predicated on the idea of creating "protected classes." And, as has been already explained many times, hate-crimes bills aren't about creating "protected categories" -- they are strictly written to encompass the motives of the perpetrator:

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The air all around is percolating with the sounds of impeaching Jay Bybee, author of a torture memo. Rep. Jerry Nadler is calling for it now.

Rep. Jerry Nadler, a senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called Monday for the impeachment of federal judge Jay Bybee, one of the principal authors of the torture memos released last week by the Obama administration.

"He ought to be impeached," Nadler said in an interview with the Huffington Post. "It was not an honest legal memo. It was an instruction manual on how to break the law."

Nadler, a New York congressman, is chairman of Judiciary's Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties Subcommittee. Bybee is currently serving a lifetime term on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, appointed in 2003 and confirmed before it was publicly known that he had authorized the torture of detainees.

Nadler is meeting with Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday to argue that the release of the torture memos further buttresses a call he had made earlier for a special prosecutor on torture.

Digby finds that Bybee has retained legal council because so far, President Obama has been mum on him:

Anything could happen:

The Obama Administration assured CIA employees Thursday that they would not be prosecuted, but the White House has offered no cover to Bybee or other government lawyers.

So for now, Bybee is on his own. The good news, however, he’s got a nationally recognized lawyer on his side, Latham & Watkins’s Maureen Mahoney, who’s handling the case pro bono. In an e-mail Thursday, Mahoney said Bybee has recused himself from Latham cases, but offered no further comment on his case.

Of course Rahm said yesterday that Obama didn't want to prosecute any former officials. But it's not really Obama's decision and it certainly isn't Rahm's. And the fact that they are out there saying it is --- for political reasons no less ("national unity" etc) --- means it behooves Holder to appoint a special prosecutor.

Bybee certainly seems to understand that he's got some issues if he has one of the top conservative lawyers in the country as his defense lawyer. He's smarter than he seems.

You can sign the petition to have the California Democratic Party Convention vote to impeach Bybee, here.

Please sing the petition. Holder was appoint a special prosecutor not named Starr to investigate.

Download | play Download | play (h/t Heather)

The media-manufactured controversies over Barack Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, aren't going to go away if the media can help it. It's much easier to talk about them than admit to propagandists on your booking lists. Rev. Wright agreed to his first public interview, and will be on Bill Moyer's Journal, which will air this evening on PBS. But advance video has the punditocracy a-twitter with the meme that Wright "throws" Obama under the bus. But the media also has a history of purposefully taking Wright's words out of context.

However, take a closer look at that panel assembled. Joe Watkins (introduced as Rev. Watkins, as he holds a divinity degree), who has worked for the Dan Quayle, Bush 41 and the current president, Kevin Madden, whose last gig was as Mitt Romney's spokesman as well as working on Bush's 2000 campaign and Lawrence O'Donnell, the lone Democrat, who formerly worked for Patrick Moynihan and was the Chief of Staff for the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works before jumping to Hollywood and The West Wing and Big Love. Could the deck be stacked any further against anything Wright says? Watch as Madden and Watkins slam Obama by attributing words that Wright did not say, much to the frustration of O'Donnell.

This is great. He’s not using those words and every pundit on TV talking about this wants to force those words into Rev. Wright’s mouth. He’s not using them so we’re pretending he’s using them.

Unqualified Offerings

Pretty much every massacre Saddam Hussein’s regime committed was undertaken as part of a war or civil war. (Iraq’s Kurds have been in periodic armed revolt since the 1960s, its Shiites since the time of the Iran-Iraq War.) Many of the individuals and families he slaughtered were connected to attempted coups and assassinations. The Dawa Party at the time of Dujail cleaved to an enemy power, theocratic Iran.

If you believe there can be such a thing as a war crime, Saddam Hussein is a notorious war criminal and deserves whatever he gets. If you believe in “war the way it needs fighting, with grim ferocity and cold unconcern for legalistic niceties,” then Saddam Hussein is your boy. You and he are brothers under the skin. If you believe that there can be war crimes when our enemies commit them, but not when we or our allies do
What’s surpassingly interesting is that the people who bleat loudest about the morality of our crusade seem to keep a healthy supply of a-moralists around to justify the rough stuff. Read it all...",0]);D(["ce"]);D(["ms","869e"]);//-->, then perhaps Saddam Hussein himself would be shamed by your company.

What’s surpassingly interesting is that the people who bleat loudest about the morality of our crusade seem to keep a healthy supply of a-moralists around to justify the rough stuff. Read it all...

The assault has continued with Podhoretz joining the fray. (James Wolcott on Podman )

The NRO lies in their article

(Update)- "Admiral Inman was quoted out of context. I spoke with him this afternoon after alerting him to the National Review online quote. He takes very seriously the compromise of Valerie's cover. He was telling Mr. Spruiell that anyone in the intel community would not be in a position to intuitively know whether Valerie was or was not undercover at first glance." LJ

Larry Johnson fired back his response: "Valerie Plame was not working as a CIA analyst, she was undercover, per press reports, as an Energy Analyst for Brewster Jennings. Inman not only misstates her position, he has no firsthand knowledge. This speaks very poorly about the journalistic standards of the NRO. To show how pathetically ignorant Inman is on the matter, there have been CIA officers who started off as an analyst, who like me were undercover. They later switched-over to a operations officer career track and are now serving overseas in undercover positions.

Jeffrey Feldman's Frameshop has always been a favorite of mine. Jeffrey has recently published Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy, which is a real eye-opener.

Jeffrey looked at Rush Limbaugh's recent crowings about "Operation Chaos" and looked at other instances where airwaves were used to foment violence:

During the Rwandan genocide of 1994, radio broadcasts called for direct acts of violence to be committed by one faction of the Rwandan public against another. These broadcasts drew considerable attention because (1) radio was the major source of information for the listeners in question, (2) the audience was largely non-literate, and (3) there was an ongoing nationalist struggle into which the broadcasts fed (emphasis mine):

In March 1992, Radio Rwanda was first used in directly promoting the killing of Tutsi in a place called Bugesera, south of the national capital. On 3 March, the radio repeatedly broadcast a communiqué supposedly sent by a human rights group based in Nairobi warning that Hutu in Bugesera would be attacked by Tutsi. Local officials built on the radio announcement to convince Hutu that they needed to protect themselves by attacking first. Led by soldiers from a nearby military base, Hutu civilians, members of the Interahamwe, a militia attached to the MRND party, and local Hutu civilians attacked and killed hundreds of Tutsi (International Commission 1993: 13-14). (from "Hate Media in Rwanda")

The broadcasts in Rwanda, thus, were directly engaged using false reports as propaganda, the goal of which was to encourage listeners to commit acts of violence. The effort worked, and subsequent investigations linked the violent language to the actual deaths, thereby including the broadcasts within the framework of the genocidal action both legally and morally.

In stark contrast, Limbaugh's broadcasts were removed from encouraging direct acts of violence, focusing instead on creating the conditions for violence--what Limbaugh described as 'chaos.' In this transcript (Apr 23, 2008), Limbaugh explains how his broadcasts are intended to incite political violence. Notice how he describes creating conditions for violence rather than actual violence (emphasis mine):

This is about chaos. This is why it's called Operation Chaos! It's not called Operation Save Hillary. It's not called Operation Nominate Obama. It's called Operation Chaos! The dream end... I mean, if people say what's your exit strategery, the dream end of this is that this keeps up to the convention and that we have a replay of Chicago 1968, with burning cars, protests, fires, literal riots, and all of that. That's the objective here. And there has been nothing that's happened on the battlefield for my vision of this to change just because Hillary won. We got what we wanted last night, and people want me to change course now? "We got what we wanted, okay, now time to support Obama." No. If Obama runs the table with the rest of these primaries, it's over, and the superdelegates are going to have a much easier choice choosing him, because he'll end up with a big lead. (from "Why It's Called Operation Chaos")

So the goal of the 'operation' for Limbaugh is not to encourage his listeners to commit acts of violence, but encourage his listeners to commit acts of politics that 'end' in Democrats committing acts of violence on each other.

Even though the violence is one step removed for Limbaugh in comparison to the 1990s broadcasts in Rwanda, Limbaugh clearly includes the eruption of political violence as an ideal goal of his rhetoric. Read on...

So the question falls to us: what can we do to not only reject this kind of violent framing, but to discourage it from continuing?